Great post, as usual. My thoughts are here:

http://www.medhumanities.org/2008/10/on-values-disab.html

If you do manage to read all the way down, you’ll note I don’t think we need face a choice between devotion to moral principles and moral intutitonism. There are variants of moral thinking, including one I am partial to (moral particularism) that simultaneously rejects generalism or principlism in morals but maintains that morality is not reducible to intuitions.

Or, to pose it as a question: is there any sense in which intuitions can be “public reasons”, or are they inherently private reasons (even if very broadly shared)?

Sam: Harry’s beaten to me to it, because he’s more familiar with this terrain than I am, but like him, I’m slowly working toward a reply. Just more slowly. In fact, I think I’ll spend the next few weeks or so here posing tentative answers to questions I don’t know how to think about yet. One of them has to do with how to reconcile the intuition to include every human born in the category of rights-bearing entities with the intuition to respect the wishes of guardians who decide (after years of agonizing) to withdraw life support from their charges. (The circus around Terri Schiavo obscured some very serious questions about guardianship, I think. More on this as I go.) I hate talking about guardianship in this way, because it overlooks the 80,000 other aspects of guardianship, but I’ll try to complicate this as I unravel a train of thought. I’ll open, though, with a nice messy conflict between the claims of guardianship and the imago dei view.

Bloix: blush. But, you know, I never really left blogging. And I will think about your comment for the next couple of weeks, too.

And ps— words fail me, Michael, as I attempt to express my joy at your return to blogging. Among all the bloggers of the world, you are the one that evokes that Holden Caulfield-like desire to meet you in person and tell you what an inspiration you are. Although, seeing that I haven’t been an adolescent for some time, I think I’ll manage to suppress the urge to hop in the car and zoom on up to State College this weekend.

As societies develop and mutually beneficial interactions among strangers become the norm, the scope of the suppression of self-interest extends to include people very different from ourselves. In a pre-modern society, any stranger is fair game for robbery. Societies that have been successful in building very large social orders are those that have scaffolded an ability to suppress self-interest in favor of strangers onto the evolved ability to suppress self-interest in favor of family members. The extension at first is virtually never to all humanity. Instead it is to larger groups that can be analogized to the family – the church, the tribe, the nation, the language group, the race. If a society can’t do this, it can’t grow. So the societies that all of us belong to are able to do it. And they do it by inculcating children with the “value” of suppressing short-term self-interest in favor of a larger group. It has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with evolutionary success.

The extension of this suppression of self-interest in favor of others is conceptualized as “rights.” We say that people “have rights” when what we mean is that certain things are prohibited even though, in a world of unbridled self-interest, those things might be done to them. And we hypothesize that these rights “are” (or perhaps “should be”) co-extensive with all of humanity. Then we argue further about the proper borders of these rights – are chimpanzees in or out? Are people in a persistent vegetative state in or out? without ever recognizing that the entire rights concept has no foundation. It is merely a construct that posits that an evolutionarily created rule of behavior has nonhistorical and non-evolutionary content.

This is indeed the wild card. It is not a great leap of speculation to anticipate a time in which the traits of a child can be “optimized” in vitro or in utero. How will our intuitions guide us then? Will there be a schism in society between superkids and “all naturals?” These possibilites will call for rigorous thinking, not a sloppy retreat into “intuitive” behaviors.

I find the conservatism of many of the CT posters to be deeply troubling, since they don’t seem to accept the abundant evidence that world society is at a major point of discontinuity, when many belief systems have to be thoroughly re-examined and even the role of the heroic intellectual must be questioned.

I will just note, for the benefit of any latecomers, that I’m very skeptical of the idea of “public reasons”; I see it as a power-grab, not a distinction. I think that all fundamental questions have no one naturally-justifiable answer—intuitions and revelation are all there are.

This is a splendid glimpse of the artistic perspective on life. The glorious circularity of being more human by showing greater instinctive humanity is the perpetual motion engine that powers the magical humanistic faith. (Trust the Force, Luke!)

The ancient Aztecs determined that their “humanity” required ripping the beating heart out of a sacrificial victim to assure that the sun would maintain its vital transit across the sky. This was the perfectly natural and widely accepted consequence of people trusting their intuitions.

I think we can do better.

It’s interesting how people who have a problem with abortion always forget that little detail.

After all, our intuitive thinking towards disabled individuals isn’t to “do everything possible to help them succeed”, but rather to acknowledge that by relatively minor sacrifices on our own part, we can significantly improve their lives. And we are rewarded for this: for most humans it makes us feel good when we help the less advantaged. It’s obviously a successful evolutionary strategy.
I would argue that if it were otherwise, then the vast majority of all humans would strongly feel that significantly disabled people should, for instance, be left to die and would probably feel satisfaction – a warm inner glow even – at seeing society rid of such a drain on its resources. In such a world any sort of legal or moral framework that gave disabled people the same rights as the rest of us would never even get off the ground, no matter how well it might be logically supportable.

I accept BTW that our intuitions are shaped by the culture of the day as well as our evolutionary past, but I think there are limits to how much cultural expectations can control the degree to which we feel good when helping others. Does anyone know of any good scientific studies of nature vs nuture behind moral intuitions?

Sweeping away everything we have learned about rationing resources among individuals to clear the path for “intuitive” thinking about treating the disabled puts us into uncharted territory. What is the intuitively correct level of investment in a disabled child? If one discards utility, the answer is infinite, because there is no limit to the enhancement of an individual’s abilities through careful and costly nurture.